December 16, 2012 "Information
Clearing House"
- This story connects far-flung places. Kenya,
Malaya, Northern Ireland and now Syria. The one
over-arching theme is British counter-insurgency
strategy, or more plainly, the use of state
terrorism by British forces to achieve political
objectives.

The story came alive again this week with two seemingly
unrelated news developments. First, we learn of deeper
involvement of Britain’s military in the violence raging
across Syria. British military officers and Special
Forces are reportedly training - in Jordanian territory
- foreign-backed militants to step up their campaign of
terrorism across Syria.

These terror gangs, whom the Western mainstream media
call “freedom fighters”, have been plunging Syria into
bloody chaos for the past 22 months, with car bombs
ripping through civilian neighbourhoods and death squads
massacring whole villages, the latest being Aqrab in
Hama Province where over 125 people where murdered this
week. Ample evidence shows that the mercenaries,
recruited from various countries including Libya, Saudi
Arabia and Iraq, are covertly supplied with weapons and
training from the US, Britain and France via the
conduits of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey.

The surge in violence and killing of civilians, with a
notable agenda of inciting sectarian war, is proof that
the British expertise in fomenting terror is paying
dividends for the Western imperialist objective of
destabilizing Syrian society and the government of
President Bashar al-Assad.

The second development this week was the publication of
an official British report into the murder 23 years ago
of Belfast lawyer Pat Finucane. The two issues, Syrian
violence and the killing of Mr Finucane, are intimately
related - although the British government and its media
have done their best to bury any connection.

Let’s unravel the layers of obfuscation.

When the review of Mr Finucane’s murder by Sir Desmond
de Silva QC was published this week, British Prime
Minister David Cameron offered an apology to the family
of the Belfast man. “I am deeply sorry,” said Cameron in
the British House of Commons, and he went on to
acknowledge that the killing pointed to “shocking levels
of collusion” between British security forces and
loyalist death squads. The latter were paramilitaries
recruited from Northern Ireland’s pro-British civilian
population that perpetrated many heinous murders during
the conflict in that territory between 1969-1994.

However, the widow of Mr Finucane and their children
denounced the latest review as a “white wash”. Geraldine
Finucane has good reason to dismiss the report because
it portrays the murder of her husband as a rogue act of
violence. Cameron added to the white wash by saying that
the case represented a “failing” by the British military
forces to prevent the murder.

This is typical official British deception. For what the
murder of Pat Finucane reveals is not a failure, but
rather a successful deployment of Britain’s policy of
state terrorism - a policy that involved the systematic
collusion between British military intelligence and
loyalist death squads. This practice was and is a
central part of British counter-insurgency tactics - a
policy that was overseen from the highest office of
British government in Downing Street.

Much of Britain’s “dirty war” strategy, as an
institutional practice, can be attributed to one of its
most decorated military commanders - General Sir Frank
Kitson.

Kitson published his war manual - Low Intensity
Operations - in 1971. It has since become a standard
text for British military counter-insurgency techniques,
or as we have noted, state terrorism.

Kitson developed his techniques from his involvement in
suppressing popular uprisings in the British colonies of
Kenya during the Mau-Mau rebellion (1953-55) and in
Malaya (1957) against a communist
insurgency there.

In 1970, the then Brigadier was dispatched to Northern
Ireland, which itself was on the cusp of a renewed Irish
republican struggle against British rule in that
province of the United Kingdom. One of Kitson’s
innovations was the recruitment of what he called
“counter gangs”. For his endeavours and “meritrocious
service”, he was later knighted by the British Queen,
later going on to serve as her aide-de-camp and elevated
to Commander-in-Chief of UK land forces from 1982-1985.

The callous
objective devised by Kitson was to use British proxy
death squads to sow as much terror and mayhem as
possible in order to destroy popular insurgency.
This was the beginning of Britain’s policy of
collusion in Northern Ireland, which operated for
nearly three decades and claimed hundreds of lives.
From the British government point of view, one great
advantage of this policy was to provide “plausible
denial” to the authorities for the state terrorism
that they were unleashing. This advantage still
pertains to this day, as can be seen from the latest
review into Pat Finucane’s murder and the hollow
apology from David Cameron “for shocking levels of
collusion”.

There is little doubt that the British state at the
highest level ordered Mr Finucane’s assassination.
During the 1980s, he was a formidable young lawyer,
successfully defending dozens of individuals who had
fallen foul to the British system of repression and
corruption of the legal process. Finucane was a thorn in
the side of the British establishment, exposing its
vicious policies of criminalising republican political
opponents.

On 17 January 1989, British cabinet minister Douglas
Hogg addressed the House of Commons and denounced what
he called “solicitors who are unduly sympathetic to the
IRA [Irish Republican Army]”. Hogg later said that he
had been briefed by “people who knew” - meaning British
intelligence. On that fateful day, Hogg effectively
signed Pat Finucane’s death warrant.

Less than a month later, on 12 February 1989, a loyalist
death squad sledgehammered its way into the Finucane
home in Belfast while the family was having Sunday
dinner. In front of his wife and three children, the
gunmen shot Pat Finucane 12 times in the head as he lay
prone on the floor of the kitchen, his terrified
children huddled under the dining table as shot after
shot rang out.

After 23 years of the family’s courageous campaigning
for justice, David Cameron admitted this week that the
murder was carried out by loyalists in collusion with
British intelligence, which had provided the killers
with target details and helped in their escape on the
day of the killing.

But this appalling murder is but the tip of a sordid
iceberg that reveals systematic state terrorism by the
British government and its military over decades in
Northern Ireland.

A year before Pat Finucane’s murder, British military
intelligence oversaw the smuggling of hundreds of
high-powered weapons from South Africa to their loyalist
paramilitary operatives in Northern Ireland.

In a seminal investigative study by Belfast-based
civilian campaign group, Relatives For Justice, titled
Collusion: 1990-1994, it was found that this supply of
firepower by British intelligence to loyalist death
squads resulted in a dramatic escalation of murders by
these same gangs. Based on forensic and ballistics data,
the weapons from South Africa were used in as many as
300 murders by loyalist death squads - nearly 10 per
cent of the total death toll during the entire conflict.
Some of the victims of state-sanctioned murder were
republican activists, but many more were just ordinary
civilians.

The murder of Pat Finucane is just one out of hundreds
of killings in Northern Ireland that the British
authorities perpetrated in their policy of collusion
with death squads. It is a policy that grew out of its
terror campaigns in East Africa and Asia and which was
“optimized” in Northern Ireland. The political objective
was to terrorise the population in the North of Ireland
into accepting a “peace process” during the 1990s that
falls way short of the legitimate claim to national
self-determination and independence of a united Ireland.

Unfortunately, it may be seen as having been a partial
British success given that Northern Ireland still
remains a sectarian territory under British jurisdiction
- despite the aspirations of the majority of Irish
people across the entire island.

In Syria, of
course, the political conditions are different.
There, the majority of Syrian people support the
government in Damascus and are opposed to foreign
interference. The so-called uprising that the
Western governments and their servile propaganda
news media trumpet is nothing but a foreign covert
criminal war of aggression fuelled by foreign
weaponry and mercenaries.

Nevertheless, one can still discern the malevolent hand
of British state terrorist expertise: the training,
weapons, intelligence and logistics. Moreover, the use
of terror gangs to inflict mayhem and sectarian
bloodletting is straight out of the British military
manual, as devised by General Sir Frank Kitson.

As car bombs tear through the bodies of Syrian
schoolchildren and as loved ones end up in side-street
gutters with bullets in the head - this is classic
British policy of using terroristic means to achieve
nefarious political ends: in this case, the
dismemberment of Syrian society and the implementation
of regime change.

Originally from
Belfast, Ireland, Finian Cunningham (born 1963) is a
prominent expert in international affairs. The author
and media commentator was expelled from Bahrain in June
2011 for his critical journalism in which he highlighted
human rights violations by the Western-backed regime. He
is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and
worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of
Chemistry, Cambridge, England,

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